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Beowulf

Contents
Beowulf: A Dual-Language Edition by Howell D. Chickering, Jr. (editor)   
Comments   
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation by Seamus Heaney (editor)   
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Beowulf: A Dual-Language Edition by Howell D. Chickering, Jr. (editor)    

Author:Howell D. Chickering Jr. (editor)
Title:Beowulf; A Dual-Language Edition
Published:1977 by Anchor Books


Description:

The first major poem in English literature, Beowulf tells the story of the life and death of the legendary hero Beowulf in his three great battles with supernatural monsters. Beowulf is an example of the heroic spirit at its finest, the ideal Anglo-Saxon warrior-aristocrat. The epic poem celebrates both his magnificent courage in his battles with Grendel, Grendel's mother, and the Dragon, and his leadership and loyalty in dealing with his fellow men. At the same time, the poem is a deeply felt elegy for the passing of such virtues and is permeated with a tragic sense of man's fate in an uncertain world. The complexity of the anonymous poet's vision and the power of his language make Beowulf a unique achievement in Old English.

Howell D. Chickering, Jr.'s new translation with a facing-page text of the Old English - the first such edition in more than a century - allows the reader the chance to encounter Beowulf as poetry. His translation is fresh and lively, and his Guide to Reading Aloud helps the modern reader without a knowledge of Old English to discover the exciting sound of the original. The Introduction and Commentary incorporate recent scholarship and provide historical and literary background. The Commentary also includes alternative translations of difficult passages and discussions of major critical problems.

description from the back-cover of the book


Comments    

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Beowulf: A New Verse Translation by Seamus Heaney (editor)    

Author:Seamus Heaney (editor)
Title:Beowulf; A New Verse Translation
Published:2000 by W.W. Norton & Company


Description:

Composed toward the end of the first millennium of our era, Beowulf is the elegiac narrative of the adventures of Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero who saves the Danes from the seemingly invincible monster Grendel and, later, from Grendel's mother. He then returns to his own country and dies in old age in a vivid fight against a dragon.

The poem is about encountering the monstrous, defeating it, and then having to live on in the exhausted aftermath. In the contours of this story, at once remote and uncannily familiar at the beginning of the twenty-first Century, Seamus Heaney finds a resonance that summons power to the poetry from deep beneath its surface.

Drawn to what he has called the "four-squareness of the utterance" in Beowulf and its immense emotional credibility, Heaney gives these epic qualities new and convincing reality for the contemporary reader.

Seamus Heaney received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. A resident of Dublin since 1976, he teaches regularly at Harvard University.

description from the back-cover of the book


Comments    

to be added...


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